CWN Part 2 - Blogabond

On to our second village. This village was a Lisu village called Baan Doi Pee Lu (ghost hole mountain village). The translation of the name of this village will be important to know for some of the stories about this village. This village is a very remote village near the town of Pai. It is a little over an hour drive down a dirt road through a wildlife sanctuary to get there. I had been to this village once before, but only for a few hours and didn’t really know much about it except for some things at the school. We had one less day in this village than the other ones, so I sent in Melissa and the students into the village while I took one student and went into town to shop for food and construction supplies. We knew that we were going to build a water storage tank, so we could go ahead and buy all the materials to save too many trips in and out of the village. When we finally made it to the village, the other students had just been sitting around for 3 hours with nothing to do. We were the very first foreigners to ever sleep in this village, so the locals were having a hard time figuring out what to do with us. When I got there, we were able to get some things figured out and get places to sleep. Then, we just let the students go explore. This is when things started to get interesting. Back to the name of the village, there is a mountain beside the village that is full of caves and is mostly a big limestone crag with jungle growing all over it. The village is animistic and believes that these caves are where the sprits live and ceremonies must be had to appease the spirits every year so they will protect rather than haunt the village. So, this mountain is very sacred to the people and they never climb it. In fact, women aren’t even allowed to go on the mountain. We didn’t know any of this when we sent the kids out, so we didn’t explain about this. Three of the more adventurous girls decided they wanted to climb the mountain and set of to climb without telling us they were going. If we knew they were going, we would have said no just because of the danger factor. As we were sitting at the school talking to some of the students, we noticed these three girls on top of the mountain. We figured there must have been a trail to get up there, so we didn’t really worry too much about it. Four hours later, they still hadn’t returned, and we sent of a few of the locals to go searching for them. Right about that time, they showed up in the back of a truck they had caught a ride with all cut up and severely dehydrated. Melissa took care of them while I ran up the mountain to meet the guys that went looking for them. I met them right at the spirit house, which was constructed to keep the spirits of the mountain at peace. When I got there, the guys looked very worried because they had just found out about the mountain and what it may mean if girls had gone on the mountain. We decided that we needed to have a meeting with the head of the village to talk about what needed to happen to fix this problem. Girls are not allowed to go on the mountain and we just had three up there. We thought that we were going to have to buy a pig to be sacrificed to appease the mountain spirits. After talking with the head of the village, he decided that we did not need to sacrifice an animal and we should be okay as long as the girls didn’t touch any of the spirit houses, which they all swore they didn’t even see them. This scared me more actually because not seeing the spirit houses meant that the girls didn’t follow any trail up the mountain. After that whole incident, we were sitting around at our house when we heard a huge explosion not far away. All the villagers around started running towards the explosion. All the students were pretty scared by this, but we soon found out that it was just a fight between two groups of young guys. They were fighting over a soccer field and one of the groups took a homemade bomb and threw it at the other group. No one was injured, but it was enough to stir up our group for the next few days. It was not a great first night in the village. Because of all this, we had to have guys sleep outside the girls houses to protect them, and all the students had a pretty bad feeling about the village the whole time. In fact, none of the girls in our group were able to get sleep for all three nights we were at the village. This is probably because they were just scared of everything, but the village head told us it was because the girls had climbed the mountain and offended the spirits. It was quite an interesting village, but in the end we were all glad to have spent time there and learn more about this village’s culture. We were also able to build water storage tanks at the school so that they can have water in the dry season. It was a fun project for the students and we had a great time at the school. The teachers at this school are really nice people from a bigger town in the valley and they are very dedicated to help out this village. They have put a lot of work into this place. When they first came, only about 50% of he children came to school and they usually came really late. Now, 2 years later, almost all of the children in the village attend school and get there on time.

Building Water Tanks

Moving on, we got to have a nice rest day in Chiang Mai and then another in the small mountain town of Chiang Dao. On the way to Chiang Dao, we stopped to do some whitewater rafting on the Mae Dtaang river. The rafting here was great (class 3 and 4 rapids) and the students loved it. It was many of the students first time to go whitewater rafting, and was a nice fun break from all the work we had been doing in the villages. After the rafting, we headed to a nice little bungalow guesthouse in Chiang Dao where we were able to rent bikes and just relax. It was a really great place with some amazing food.

Ahka Village

The next stop, was moving towards our last village right on the Burmese border in the far north of Thailand. We drove for about three hours, and then jumped on a boat to head down the river 3 hours to the town of Chiang Rai. Our last village was an Ahka village high on the mountain. In the village, it was very cold and foggy all the time. This village has constant clouds and fog, and even in the hot season in Thailand, it is cold up there. This village also has a really interesting history. It was one of the biggest opium producing villages in this part of Thailand. It was occupied by Chinese, Burmese and local Thai people. Everyone wanted a piece of the drug money that was coming in. Where the school sits today, there was once a big Chinese opium factory. This was only 30 years ago and many villagers still remember this time. There are also many Chinese people still living in the area. When opium was on the way out of this area, The King built a road to the village and taught the villagers to grow coffee. This remains the main crop of the area today and the villagers are very happy about all of this. The best part is that coffee plants can be grown under the canopy of other trees, so much of the surrounding land has been replanted and natural forests are beginning to replenish themselves. Our time at this village was great as well. The locals were very friendly and we learned a lot about Ahka culture. We spent a lot of time teaching at the school where we were the very first foreigners to ever teach at. The kids were all really excited to be able to learn and practice English with native speakers. Also, at the school, we cleaned the bathrooms and gave them a fresh coat of paint. It was a very dirty job, but one that really needed to be done. This village was a great way to finish off the trip although many of the students were sick though most of this village.

The White Temple

On the last day of the trip, we visited a nice waterfall, hot springs, and had a great lunch on the river. We spent the night at a nice guesthouse at a fishing resort, and had a nice breakfast the next morning before boarding the plane to head out. Overall, it was a great trip and I received many emails from parents saying how much their kids enjoyed and learned from our trip.

written by

jasonreevesmiller on August 16, 2008 from Chiang Rai, Thailand

from the travel blog: Thailand Summer 2008

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